A Case of Mistaken Identity (originally published 6/95)

Unless I'm badly misreading the signs down at the local newsstand, it seems to be Sandra Bullock's turn to be the flavor of the month. Over the past few months, by my careful count, she has been on the cover of every major publication except "Scientific American" and "Field and Stream." All she needs to do to complete the sweep is discover a formula for cold fusion while on a hunting trip.

It's no accident, however, that she is enjoying her hour in the spotlight. In addition to her talent and engaging screen presence, she seems to have a knack for choosing vehicles built around tried and true formulas. "Speed," for example, tapped into the bottomless appetite of movie audiences for high-octane chase scenes. Her current film, "While You Were Sleeping," makes use of an equally sturdy dramatic device, that of mistaken identity. It is, in fact, one of the oldest plot devices, and has served as the basis for both comedy and drama with equal success. If you've enjoyed the comic confusion resulting from Bullock's impersonation of an unconscious man's fiancee in "While You Were Sleeping," here are some earlier examples of mistaken identity comedies to look for on home video.

"Along Came Jones" (1945). Gary Cooper plays Melody Jones, an inoffensive and thoroughly inept cowboy who can barely hold a gun, let alone shoot one. He does, however, resemble Monte Jarrod (Dan Duryea), a gunfighter who is feared throughout the territory. Even the initials on his saddle seem to confirm that Jones is Jarrod. Cooper, who produced the film, plays the confusion for comic effect in a gentle parody of his own heroic screen image. It was a gutsy move -- or a foolhardy one, depending on your point of view. Cecil B. DeMille, for one, advised Cooper that his audience would never forgive him if he undermined their cherished image of him. Luckily, Coop's fans showed more tolerance than DeMille had given them credit for. They no doubt recalled how engaging Cooper had been as the gentle and amusing Longfellow Deeds in "Mr. Deeds Goes To Town" (1936), a connection that is explicitly played up in the film's original coming attractions trailer, which is reproduced below courtesy of Turner Classic Movies.



"The Court Jester" (1956). In what is generally regarded as his best film, Danny Kaye parodies swashbuckling adventures of the Robin Hood variety. Kaye plays Hawkins, a lowly servant to the leaders of a peasant rebellion against a usurping king. To prove himself worthy, Hawkins assumes the identity of the usurper's court jester in order to assist his compatriots from the inside. This is the film that features Kaye's classic routine in which he vainly tries to keep straight whether the "pellet with the poison" is in the "vessel with the pestle" or the "flagon with the dragon." Another highlight is Basil Rathbone poking fun at his own villainous image much as Cooper had done with his heroic image in "Along Came Jones."

"Top Hat" (1935). No one used mistaken identity more entertainingly than Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, as this delightful musical demonstrates. Jerry Travers (Astaire) meets Dale Tremont (Rogers) at a resort near Venice and is instantly smitten. Dale, however, wants nothing to do with Jerry. The situation only gets worse when Dale gets the mistaken impression that Jerry is married to a friend of hers named Madge (Helen Broderick). In fact, Madge has invited Dale for the specific purpose of introducing her to Jerry, thinking that they might hit it off. This leads to lots of comic business in which Madge seems to be encouraging Dale to dally with her husband. The plot is great fun, the Irving Berlin songs are first-rate, and the dancing, needless to say, is sublime.

"Bachelor Mother" (1939). Ginger Rogers stars, without Fred Astaire this time, as a department store employee who finds herself stuck with an abandoned baby. Having agreed to hold the baby for a moment, she gradually realizes that no one is coming back for it. Everyone assumes that she's the child's mother, and nothing she says can convince them otherwise. It is further assumed that the child's father is the son of the store's owner, a suave young playboy played by David Niven.

It is little short of a miracle that a comedy with such racy overtones was made and released during the height of the Hollywood production code, which was designed to keep movie content squeaky clean to head off government censorship. If you want to watch it, though, go ahead. If the censorship police come after you, you can always claim that they've got the wrong person.

Calamities Aplenty (originally published 5/95)

The storytellers who create our history for us have the power to confer immortality. If enough of them choose to include a particular name in their tales, that name will acquire a life of its own, independent of its owner and therefore undiminished by his or her earthly demise.

There is, of course, a trade-off. In order to become such a mythic figure, it is necessary to give up your identity as a real, flesh and blood person. Once that happens, the realities of who you really were and what you actually did become irrelevant. The storytellers have an absolute license to choose good storytelling over factual accuracy, and they don't hesitate to use it.

That's why the real woman who was Martha Jane Cannary is even more thoroughly lost to history than most of her contemporaries. She has been superseded for all time by the legend of Calamity Jane, who may or may not have been the mother of Wild Bill Hickock's child, and who may or may not have toured with Buffalo Bill Cody's legendary Wild West Show. It all depends on who is telling the story.

If you saw "Buffalo Girls" on television, with Anjelica Huston in the role of Calamity Jane, you might be interested to see some of the other movie portrayals of this mythic figure. The few that are available on video are representative of the broad range of interpretations to which her legend has been subjected.

"The Plainsman" (1936). Cecil B. DeMille's epic saga of the American West features Gary Cooper as Hickock and Jean Arthur as Calamity Jane. This was crafty casting, since Cooper and Arthur had teamed up extremely successfully earlier that same year in Frank Capra's "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town." Arthur is a very feminine Calamity Jane, showing just a little tomboyishness around the edges. This was a time when women with a masculine temperament and demeanor were invariably presented in a condescending, isn't-that-cute manner, as if she were a child pretending to be a grownup.

"The Paleface" (1948). Jane Russell's version of Calamity Jane in this Bob Hope comedy is a kind of double parody. She's spoofing both the legend of Calamity Jane and her own infamous film debut in the Howard Hughes western, "The Outlaw" (1943). Hope is a tenderfoot dentist whom Calamity marries so that she can travel incognito. Since she has no real interest in him, part of the comedy revolves around Calamity consistently parrying his every effort to consummate the marriage. This Calamity is allowed to be genuinely tough and capable, rather than just a cute tomboy, because part of the comedy premise is the gender role reversal with the weak and helpless Hope.

"Calamity Jane" (1953). Sooner or later, it was inevitable that Calamity would get her own musical. Doris Day plays the title role as a charming tomboy. She's always been content to be looked on as just one of the boys, but realizes that there is a downside to her lack of femininity when she develops a crush on a certain soldier. Although that romance doesn't work out, it does lead Calamity to the realization that she has been in love with Bill Hickock all along. Looking back on it from our contemporary perspective, the film can be read as a wry commentary on gender roles, although I'm not so sure that it was originally intended that way. Day's performance of the song "Secret Love" became a hit record and won the Academy Award as Best Song. Reproduced below, courtesy of Turner Classic Movies, is the film's trailer.




"Calamity Jane" (1984). This made-for-TV movie takes an approach to the character of Calamity that is very similar in some ways to that of "Buffalo Girls." There is a conscious effort to minimize the cutesy tomboyishness of earlier portrayals and to create instead a more rounded and believable character. This is necessary in part because she is presented here as the central character in a dramatic film. No caricature could carry our interest over such an extended dramatic work. Like "Buffalo Girls," this version of Calamity's life includes the daughter she gave away and the emotional cost of that decision. Calamity is capably played by Jane Alexander.

This is, by the way, the same Jane Alexander who recently became the director of the National Endowment for the Arts. I imagine that her experience playing Calamity Jane has served her well in that role, now that she has had to learn to circle the wagons and shoot it out with savages for real.

Dark Carnival (originally published 10/95)

This time of year I'm always on the lookout for new books about horror movies and the people who made them. Publishers, who know a thing or two about promotions, generally try to arrange the release of such titles to coincide with the Halloween season. This year, the most interesting title I've seen is "Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning, Hollywood's Master of the Macabre," by David J. Skal and Elias Savada, published by Anchor.

If you conceive of Halloween as the creation of entertainment out of the morbid and the profane, it's hard to imagine a more appropriate Halloween publication. Tod Browning's early experiences as a carnival sideshow barker combined with his survival of a gruesome car crash to produce in him a lifelong fascination with disfigurement and mutilation. This obsession turns up over and over in his films, many of which are regarded as classics of the horror genre. Most of them aren't about monsters at all, but the potent strain of perverse morbidity that runs through them leaves no doubt about which genre they belong to.

"The Unknown" (1927). Browning's favorite actor, not surprisingly, was Lon Chaney Sr. Because of his elaborate and impressive talents with character make-up, Chaney had become known as the "Man of a Thousand Faces." In fact, however, it was more than just his face that was malleable. He also was willing and able to distort his body, even at the cost of considerable discomfort. For this Browning-directed melodrama, Chaney played Alonzo, a circus performer who poses as an armless knife thrower, manipulating the blades with his feet. In fact, his arms are merely bound behind his back for his performances. But when he falls for a woman who is pathologically fearful of being embraced by men, he has his arms amputated for real. In the meantime, however, his beloved has apparently gotten over her fear of men's arms and has become infatuated with the circus strongman. Alonzo's love is instantly transformed into a lust for vengeance, leading him to plot a grisly death for the strongman.

"West of Zanzibar" (1928). This Browning-Chaney collaboration, like many of their films together, repeats the formula of disfigurement and vengeance. It was a popular formula, much like the slasher formula is today, possibly because it tapped into the anger of maimed soldiers who returned from World War I to make their way through life without an arm or leg, or with a disfigured face. In earlier wars, Skal points out, soldiers who sustained such deeply maiming wounds would have died from them in short order, but by the early twentieth century advances in medicine had made such wounds survivable. This, in turn, led to guilt feelings among the maimed soldiers' loved ones, many of whom felt conscience-stricken because of secret feelings of revulsion toward their husbands and fathers, who were, after all, war heroes in addition to being family members. Naturally, most of this anger and guilt was repressed, and emotions that are repressed on a wide scale have a tendency to bubble up in the popular culture, especially movies. In "West of Zanzibar," Chaney plays a bitter man who was paralyzed from the waist down in a fight with a romantic rival. Leaving civilization behind, he withdraws to a remote village in Africa where he holes up and plots his revenge.

"Dracula" (1931). This version of the classic vampire tale was not adapted from Bram Stoker's novel, but rather from the popular stage play by Hamilton Deane and John Balderston. Bela Lugosi repeated the role he had created on the stage, and the rest, as they say, is history. Reproduced below, courtesy of Turner Classic Movies, is the promotional trailer from a re-release of the film.



"Freaks" (1932). This disturbing little movie represents the culmination of Browning's obsession with disfigurement and physical anomalies. Chaney, who could counterfeit such conditions so well, had met an untimely death in 1930. This time, Browning went with the real thing, using actual carnival sideshow attractions in his cast. Once seen, Browning's cautionary tale about the consequences of intolerance toward those who are different may well find its way into your nightmares.

"Devil Doll" (1936). Lionel Barrymore plays a man who has escaped from Devil's Island, where he was sent for a crime he did not commit. Seeking revenge, he appropriates an experimental miniaturization technique to shrink his accomplices to the size of figurines. He then presents them to those who framed him as dolls for their children. When the "dolls" awake from the trance state induced by the shrinking process, they avenge the frame-up in grisly fashion.

Browning was one of the most intriguing filmmakers ever produced by the Hollywood system. Skal and Savada's biography is a fascinating attempt to shed new light on the bruised and obsessive psyche that created these cinematic nightmares.

Old Friends (originally published 11/95)

In the title of her 1976 autobiography, Simone Signoret made the wry observation that "nostalgia isn't what it used to be." Perhaps not, but at least for filmmakers its appeal as story material remains undiminished. "Now and Then," a current release, uses a favorite type of nostalgia story, tracing the arc of a group friendship over a number of years.

It's easy to see why such a premise appeals to moviemakers. It allows them to develop something like the narrative sweep of an epic while exploring characterization at a level usually reserved for small, intimate stories. If that combination of elements appeals to you, here are some earlier films that trace the evolution of a circle of friends over time. Each is available on home video.

"Return of the Secaucus 7" (1980). This was the low budget film that put John Sayles on the map as a writer and director. He shows us the reunion of a group of former college classmates whose claim to fame is that they were arrested in Secaucus, New Jersey, while on their way to a 1960s protest rally in Washington. Instead of showing us their earlier days through flashbacks, Sayles allows the backstory to emerge through the dialogue as the friends reminisce. It may sound like a talky and static approach, but Sayles has a playwright's sure-footed knack for dialogue. Scenes that might have become tedious in the hands of a lesser screenwriter are invested with energy and interest by Sayles's craftsmanship. One measure of the film's popularity and influence is the fact that in 1983 Lawrence Kasdan would attempt what amounted to a big budget remake of "Return of the Secaucus 7" with "The Big Chill."

"Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean" (1982). In the mid-1950s James Dean came to Texas to give what would turn out to be his last film performance in George Stevens's film "Giant" (1956). This is the story of six members of the James Dean fan club of McCarthy, Texas, for whom their idol's presence in their midst had been a transcendental moment. Twenty years after Dean's fatal car crash the club reassembles in a small McCarthy dime store. The main characters are Jo (Karen Black), Sissy (Cher), and Mona (Sandy Dennis). As flashbacks weave in and out of present day scenes, we watch with mounting dismay as secrets are revealed and carefully nurtured delusions are shattered. Mona, for example, is forced to abandon her cherished fantasy that her son is James Dean's love child. Director Robert Altman had originally mounted this play on the stage, then used the same sets to translate it to film very inexpensively. With its sustained emotional intensity and very little in the way of comic relief, this is certainly not a film for all tastes. It is, however, a great vehicle for virtuoso acting. In fact, this was the film that established, once and for all, Cher's credentials as a dramatic actor.

"Four Friends" (1981). In 1979, screenwriter Steve Tesich made quite an impressive debut with his script for "Breaking Away," for which he drew on his experiences at college in Indiana. "Four Friends" is more ambitious. Here he seeks to put in dramatic perspective his experiences as the son of an immigrant family growing up during the turbulent decade of the 1960s. Beginning in the high school years, the film follows the lives of three male classmates and the young woman with whom each will be romantically involved. Danilo (Craig Wasson) is the main character. It's interesting to watch him come to grips with the Vietnam War protest movement. He hates the war, but at the same time he brings an immigrant's perspective to the extremity of the protest, worrying whether these American youngsters have adequate respect for the freedom they take for granted. Watching this film now, you will be irresistibly reminded of "Forrest Gump" (1994), as Tesich and director Arthur Penn slide in references to significant events that help define the times.

By the way, if you want to compare these American films with some foreign titles dealing with similar themes, try Ettore Scola's "We All Loved Each Other So Much" (1974) and Federico Fellini's "I Vitelloni" (1953). You'll see that friendship, nostalgia, and filmmaking talent know no national bounds.

One Foot in the Grave (originally published 10/95)

Diane Keaton's career as a director has taken on an interesting trajectory. With "Heaven" (1987), she looked at the afterlife. Now, with her current release, "Unstrung Heroes," she is dealing with death. I wonder if she's planning to work her way by slow degrees back to the cradle, or even to the womb.

Actually, by smiting Andie MacDowell with a fatal illness, Keaton is following one of the movies' oldest and most surefire traditions. Lay your main character low with a terminal disease, and the world will beat a path to the boxoffice to buy tickets to your show. If, like most of us, your idea of a good time is watching the slow demise of a fellow mortal on the screen, there are a multitude of classic titles to choose from. Here are a few of the better ones available on video.

"Dark Victory" (1939). Bette Davis gives what may be her best performance ever as doomed socialite Judith Traherne, whose glamorous life is about to be terminated by a brain tumor. The role is memorable in part because Davis is called upon to employ virtually her entire emotional palette. She goes from being a carefree, spoiled child of fortune to a humbled convalescent in love with the doctor who has saved her life. Then, learning that her cure is only temporary, she turns to the wild life, determined to go out with a flourish. Finally, she finds the path to a dignified death. Davis negotiates this cascade of emotional reversals with sure-footed grace and skill. Reproduced below, courtesy of Turner Classic Movies, is the film's promotional trailer.



"Diary of a Country Priest" (1950). If virtuoso acting and Hollywood's multiple-hanky approach to terminal illness puts you off, you might appreciate this quiet masterpiece by French filmmaker Robert Bresson. The title character is a young priest doing his best to minister to rural folk whose responses to his overtures range from apathy to outright hostility. When the priest falls ill, a victim of stomach cancer, Bresson methodically follows his decline and death, refusing at every turn to romanticize or sentimentalize the story.

"Cries and Whispers" (1972). Ingmar Bergman may well be world cinema's foremost interpreter of despair. This agonizing story of a woman dying of cancer is classic Bergman material. The main character's two sisters have come to be with her in her time of need, but only the faithful family maid is capable of the emotional connection that nurturing requires.

"Ikiru" (1952). Master Japanese director Akira Kurosawa shows us the last few months in the life of a man who is dying of cancer. The main character is a low-level bureaucrat whose life seems to have little meaning. Now that he is facing the end, however, he's determined to make every moment count. He turns to his family for comfort but finds them cold and apathetic. He tries indulging the pleasures of the flesh but finds no comfort there either. Ironically, in the end it is his dead-end job that provides him with a way to restore meaning to his existence.

"The Shootist" (1976). This was screen legend John Wayne's last film before cancer took him from us. Under the circumstances, it's hard to imagine a more perfect swan song. Wayne portrays J.B. Books, a legendary gunfighter at the end of his life, slowly and painfully dying of cancer. The parallels with Wayne's own life are too vivid to ignore, and director Don Siegel doesn't even try. In fact, the film begins with a recap of Books's celebrated exploits using clips from Wayne's earlier films.

"Bang the Drum Slowly" (1973). In one of his early roles, Robert De Niro plays Bruce Pearson, a baseball catcher who is afflicted with Hodgkin's disease. Michael Moriarty plays pitcher Henry wiggen, Bruce's roommate and friend. Bruce is dimwitted and naive, while Henry fancies himself a writer. Henry therefore remains in a more or less permanent state of exasperation over Bruce's cluelessness. Even so, Henry can't bring himself to abandon a dying friend. Instead, he sticks by Bruce, becoming his advocate when the team's manager, unaware of Bruce's condition, wants to send him back to the minor leagues.

As we've seen, stories of imminent death cut across both national boundaries and stylistic boundaries. There are even comedies on the subject, such as the wonderful "Nothing Sacred" (1937). Human mortality may well be the most universal subject matter of all, making stories about terminal illness a truly immortal dramatic form.

Distorting History For Fun and Profit (originally published 10/95)

One of the silliest spectacles I've witnessed lately is the protracted breast-beating over the historical inaccuracies in Disney's "Pocahontas." Not that the breast-beaters are wrong, mind you. Obviously, there were distortions in the picture that would have made P.T. Barnum blush. What amused me was the idea that anyone would expect rigorous historical accuracy from a movie.

It reminds me of nothing so much as the scene in "Casablanca" in which Claude Rains as Captain Renault needs a quick pretext for shutting down Bogie's cafe. "I am shocked," he intones solemnly, "shocked to find that gambling is going on in here," at which point he is interrupted by the croupier bringing him his winnings for the evening.

Can anyone honestly be dismayed and disillusioned to learn that a Disney cartoon wouldn't pass muster with the editorial board at "American Heritage?" If so, I'll resist the temptation to sell you some prime real estate and send you instead to the corner video store for some other prime examples of historical scholarship, movie-style. They're all good, entertaining movies, but if you plan on paying attention to the historical context, better bring along your hip-waders.

"The Crusades" (1935). Nobody was better at making a glorious mess of history than Cecil B. DeMille. This spectacular and supremely entertaining fairy tale features rock-jawed Henry Wilcoxon as Richard the Lion-Heart. This, however, is the Richard of Sir Walter Scott, not the indifferent monarch of the history books. The film actually deals only with the third Crusade, despite the all-inclusive title, but that hardly matters. What it's actually all about are some really nifty battle scenes.

"Queen Christina" (1933). The great Greta Garbo is at her absolute greatest in this lavishly romantic tale of the 17th century Swedish queen who abdicated her throne for the love of a man. Except that she actually did no such thing. It was a combination of her devotion to art and philosophy and her desire to convert to Catholicism that led Christina to renounce the throne of Sweden. Moreover, by all accounts her habits of personal hygiene pretty much precluded the possibility of a lover in any case.

"The General" (1927). Silent film comic Buster Keaton gave the American cinema one of its crown jewels with this classic Civil War story. Keaton plays the engineer of the Confederate locomotive called "The General." When the General is stolen by Yankee spies, Buster takes off in pursuit on another train. The locomotive chase really did happen, but Keaton would have you believe that this spunky engineer singlehandedly captured a Yankee general, and all because he loved his train too much to stand by and allow it to be stolen. It's great filmmaking, but as history it won't wash.

"My Darling Clementine" (1946). This retelling of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral is one of director John Ford's masterpieces. Henry Fonda is brilliant as Wyatt Earp. As history, however, it's mush. Doc Holliday is portrayed as a surgeon (he was a dentist) and Wyatt is portrayed as the sheriff of Tombstone (it was actually his brother, Virgil Earp, who held that office). Also, the actual gunfight was more of a massacre to settle a grudge than a desperate struggle over high principles.

"Richard III" (1955). Laurence Olivier's adaptation of the Shakespeare classic is a noble effort to capture a difficult play on film. Once again, however, it fails as history. There's very little to support the idea that Richard was a psychotic villain. He probably wasn't a Boy Scout -- nice guys generally didn't get to be king in 15th century England -- but he almost certainly wasn't the ogre that Shakespeare creates for us.

If this last example doesn't make my point for me, nothing will. If you're going to berate every period movie that doesn't square with the history books, you're going to end up watching a bare handful of very dull films over and over. And you're going to miss out on some of the best entertainment ever created. When you're throwing the Bard of Avon out with the bathwater, maybe it's time to take a step back and reconsider your standards.

Instead of getting worked up over "Pocahontas," maybe we'd be better off keeping our powder dry for the next Disney assault on Manassas. In fact, now that they own a network, it wouldn't hurt to keep a close eye on the "ABC Evening News." But for mercy's sake, let's not lose our grip when a cartoon fudges the historical facts.

The Gumshoes (originally published 9/95)

Few characters in the movies, and in fiction as a whole, are more durable than the private investigator. He's a fascinating, solitary figure, serving the ends of justice like a policeman, and yet largely free of the constraints that society places on its law enforcement officers. The writers who have given us the most enduring private eye characters tend to play on the lone wolf aspect of the profession to give us a romanticized vision of a man whose personal code of ethics takes precedence over a corrupt society's rules.

The golden era of such private eye tales was the 1930s and 40s, when Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler were at their peak. The new Denzel Washington film, "Devil in a Blue Dress," returns to that period as the setting for its story. By setting up shop on such classic turf, both generically and chronologically, the filmmakers invite comparison, as did Walter Mosley, the author of the novel on which the film is based. Mosley's novel stood up very well under the comparison, leading to a successful series of novels featuring the character of Easy Rawlins. If you want to see if the movie compares as well with its classic counterparts, you'll want to seek out the movie incarnations of Hammett's Sam Spade and Chandler's Philip Marlowe. Between them, these two characters constitute the absolute prototype of the hard-boiled gumshoe. Look for these titles on home video.

"The Maltese Falcon" (1941). Sam Spade appeared in print in only a single novel and a handful of short stories, but the mark he left on the detective genre is profound and indelible. The novel, "The Maltese Falcon," has been adapted for the screen several times, and the character of Spade became the basis for a popular radio drama series starring Howard Duff. The Sam Spade who will endure, however, is the 1941 movie portrayal by Humphrey Bogart. He embodied the essence of the wisecracking private eye who plays strictly by his own rules and always manages to one-up his antagonists. In this classic film, Spade encounters a group of shady characters who are obsessed with the pursuit of an artifact of incalculable value -- the statue of a falcon, embedded with precious stones. The supporting cast is impressive, including Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet, and Mary Astor, but it is Bogart's performance and the fascinating character of Spade himself that make the film work.

"Murder, My Sweet" (1944). Even more intriguing than Sam Spade is Raymond Chandler's private eye, Philip Marlowe. Whereas Spade is a pragmatist, Marlowe is more of an idealist. Both have adapted to the underbelly of urban life, but Marlowe remains perpetually disappointed by it. Both are hard-bitten cynics, but Spade's cynicism goes right to the bone, while Marlowe's is nothing more than a surface armor, a carapace that defends him against a hard and brutal world. Marlowe, in short, is a contradiction, which makes him more complex, and therefore more interesting, than Spade. In "Murder, My Sweet," director Edward Dmytryk exploited the contradictions at the heart of Marlowe's character by casting against type. Dick Powell had been known primarily as a singer, having starred in a string of light musicals. With this film he sharply changed that image, giving a memorable performance as the hard-nosed Marlowe. Hired by a thug to trace his missing girlfriend and simultaneously hired by a society matron to investigate a murder, Marlowe learns that the upper crust and the dregs of society aren't all that different when you start digging into their secrets.

"Farewell, My Lovely" (1975). Some 30 years later, this same story was remade, restoring Chandler's original title and featuring Robert Mitchum as Marlowe. Mitchum is absolutely brilliant in the role, creating the most achingly world-weary Marlowe of all. This is a man who has seen it all. And most of what he's seen, he hasn't liked.

The real fruition of the hard-boiled private eye film occurred during and immediately following World War II, as many Americans returned from the battlefields of Europe and Asia having seen a side of humanity that they didn't like. We had lost our collective innocence at Buchenwald and Dresden, and our movies turned dark to reflect that fact.

By now, however, we have become more hardened, more like Sam Spade and less like Marlowe as a society. It will be interesting to see what sort of societal mood "Devil in a Blue Dress" reflects.